Thirteen Teethmarks
by flesh and bone telephone
Summary: "And I will be," he promises. "I'll always be." — Katherine would rather have been devoured by lions, drowned by leviathans than to once more catch his eye in the flow of a crowded room. FOR HANNAH.


**disclaimer:** dude, i don't even know anymore.  
><strong>dedication:<strong> FOR HANNAH, (aka 'but seriously') my main ho. who requested the devil prompts of devil prompts that I could not satisfy any of except for the pairings, and i cheated on that shit too because i'm one sneaky ho yo. so no ihop hannah, so sorry.  
><strong>warning:<strong> i wrote a story where people don't burst into ballroom scenes, i am shocked at myself.  
><strong>notes:<strong> ugh, idek. totally mangled cannon here. pairings; katherine/elijah, plus a slip of suggested elena/elijah and echoes of tatia/elijah. Or elijah/dignityhonoursexysexysexy. that's totally a pairing, btw.  
><strong>even moar notes:<strong> it seems all i can offer is adjective, similes and metaphor porn. i worked on this for hours, so i am prepared for readers to be underwhelmed. i thought i'd be an artsy self righteous hipster and experiment with format. if you don't get it by the time you finish reading the fic then you're probably a noob. just saying. your fault, not mine. so yeah. throw me down and kick me to death if you dare, hannah.

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><p>.<p>

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_But there are days in this life  
>When you see the teeth marks of time.<br>And know that we need is one thing  
>Now what is there to allow?<br>_

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><p><em><strong>1<strong>3**.**_  
>Elijah thinks the years too long, too dull - even for such a grave man like himself - not to have something to chase.<p>

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1**2**.

If she's the devil, then he traps her in the tomb with a glance, looks a vengeful angle in his crisp suit - his shining cuff links, the fall of his hair coloured like cedar, polished and resplendent as a messenger sent down for her. He's the grim reaper, he's the death toll and he's miserable, she wants to think, he's _miserable._

She wretches back, terror rife in her face and he smiles a soft grave thing. Eyes a pale grey pulling her in like a sailor into a watery grave.

He's got her, she's been had.

The game is over.

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**1**1.

Elena Gilbert.

Sandwiched between two warring brothers, the damsel of a faraway tale, the one he can save were he failed with Katerina. The Katerina with the soft eyes, the Katerina of old who would have preferred to wear petals in her hair over Empress pearls, who would have smiled rather than be coy or sly - Elena who was alive, folding her arms, leant against the doorframe wondering how Elijah can look at her so steadily.

He wonders if she's ever run barefoot through gardens_ (- skirts billowing lilac and calling, shrieking, laughing his name-)_

Elena is nothing like Katerina is, but Katerina is Katherine Pierce now, she is something else and she will never be what she once was. Katherine's kisses are meant to kill, with lips wrought from fire, kisses to ruin and not to save .

She's there,_ wearing a dead girl's face_ - she hisses somewhere in his mind, trapped in a tomb, caught like an animal, from memory, from a place, from an imagining all of his own,_ she's wearing a dead girl's face, she isn't Tatia, and she isn't me. And she isn't your saving grace._

I know, he echoes back, a terrible aching rises up like a storm in his heart. I know.

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1**0**.

Elijah trailed behind Katherine Pierce (-this stranger's name set against a stranger's face - he knows her, he _should_ know her. But she's changed, she isn't _that_ girl anymore, she isn't _Katerina_-), just out of reach, keeping her fear fresh. Keeping her anger, wild.

He didn't know if he was a guardian or an antagonist, or even a ghost anymore. It had been going on for so long. So long.

It would never stop.

She disappears into America, the promised land. Kateri-_Katherine's_ Jerusalem.

He doesn't see her for another hundred years.

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**9**.

She evades him only because he lets her, and that doesn't make her anymore complacent. If one thing she's ever stopped being it's that, and she's decidedly un-level-headed when she stops and waits for him in Hungary - the waters of the Balaton wrench black and blue, rolling like bruises and curling fists of wind into her hair. She waits on the dock, arms folded, chin tucked to her chest and clothed in a large coat. A mining worker's coat stolen from a larger man, looted from a corpse.

He steps onto the wooden boards, and stops behind her.

She hates him, how he _hovers_. Like a guillotine blade.

"Why do you keep this up?" she asks without looking at him. "This charade -"

"Is it keeping you alive?" Calm and cool, so rational, all the time. So steady and grim and reasonable - she hates it. She _hates_ it. Katerina doesn't answer. "Then it shouldn't warrant a complaint." Not on her part anyway.

She whirls at him, a fighter rounding, a soldier against a paramount adversary. Perhaps she thinks she's David and he's Goliath, and she'll look for all the stones she can possibly throw but Elijah never gets struck down.

Elijah can't be killed and overcome with a single blow if ever.

Her face is red, cold clinching against her skin, eyes bright with rage, and something that Elijah knows too well not to recognise as despair. "I don't deserve any of this," she says harshly, so mean and so direct and so very very Katherine. "I want to live, I never wanted to be a doppelganger, I never wanted to wear her face."

He should feel ashamed.

"I want to live."

"You're doing so."

"No, I'm not. You're here, aren't you? You're following me. You're _everywhere._"

She's just as persistent in his thoughts, he doesn't think he's living either. He smiles, it's almost self depreciating, too grim not to be a warning to her though. "And I will be," he promises. "I'll always be."

She can't say a word after that. She looks absolutely struck, shaken wordless. For a long moment he thinks she's stopped breathing.

Elijah means it, he means it all, every word.

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**8.**

He lets her go, as surely as a blindfolded master throws a knife. Knowing not where she lands as steel flies from his fingers, just as flighty, just as damaging, but knowing that she'll cause a disaster wherever she etches her point.

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><strong>

**7**.

She drinks blood like water, hunts like a demon and proves just as tenacious as any man. However, Klaus is just as persistent and Elijah made a damning promise to find her, find Katerina and reel her in for a reckoning. Sent forward like a faithful servant, _like a dog_, Katerina spits, _you're nothing but a dog_ - Elijah is there all the same.

He's in Marie Antoinette's court to see Katerina so changed with her powdered piled up hair and her long swan neck, the proud tilt of her chin. One thing is clear; she's not the same barefooted girl with nettles in her hair and the only way she says his name now is like a curse.

He pins her in a curtained alcove, in a lover's corridor. Men and women's laughter and the swirl of petticoats as lovers run down an pull each other into dark corners. Elijah holds her breath, feeling her heartbeat in his hands were he grips her throat and waiting over the noise to see if she's been noticed missing. She's blonde now, and it's wrong that her hair dark as earth is now in tight little ringlets, she smells exquisite, divine. But all poison fruits need must do so.

Her nails dig into his wrist and she snarls like a cat, eyes biting. Knowing him like she knows his every fault.

"So you've become a Queen." He observes. It's clever, he'll concede. Hiding in plain sight, but it's also so very very stupid - vampires attended French court frequently, and did she really think no one would _know?_ "The Dauphin, bravo."

"Elijah, you're still the same obedient fool I saw last."

Elijah has a heart as heavy as stone, but just as sure and moved just as slow. His anger, however, does not even spark. He's not as governed by impulse as Klaus is, as Rebekah and Kol most certainly are.

"Go ahead," she dares moving her lips and pronouncing the red rouged like the sheen of an apple against them. "Kill me."

They both know it's not that easy, Klaus wants a slow death, a painful one. He doesn't like being disappointed and Elijah can't go back home because he promised he'd bring Klaus his prize, his sinner. It's funny, he's been thrown out of heaven, kicked like a cur and he can't come back until he does this deed, until he brings her back. He's been _disowned._

Whose children, he wonders, are those that the Queen and King have sired? They cannot be Katerina's. She lost the ability to have children the day she lost to immortality. Probably taken from the streets, even if she's a devil and a temptress Katerina always has had an unquenchable thirst for what she can never have - children, there's a pang of ice in his chest,_ children_. He wants to pity her, but Katerina's become something incapable of that human emotion, and she'll use it against him one way or another. The way she's using her sighs now, the way she casts her lashes low so her eyes are like embers, the way her heart beats hard and fast against his palm.

She's trying to seduce him again. And it won't take much for her to succeed because Elijah is a constant man, traditional in his standards, and he's under the doppelganger spell. Even a man of his impeccable firmness would be once more seduced by such glittering memories made fresh, made tainted, spiked with the new world and new order and the new art that has brought forth such a scandal like Katerina once more. Pulsing with vitality, hating him fiercely because she wore a dead girl's face and she saw it in his eyes and would forever see it in her own, waking up on mornings to stare in the mirror wondering who the hell this Tatia girl was and how she could ever so steal into her life even after she was long buried.

And made her think, if that was all she would ever be; a doppelganger wearing a dead girl's face.

But she resolved, was damned enough, hellish enough to be _more_ than that.

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><strong>

**6.**

The texture of his skin she remembers as once feeling like alabaster, cold stone that Michael Angelo himself had wrought and rendered miraculous. Elijah had hands made to slip through skin like smoke and directly kill the pulsing thing caged behind her ribs. Withstanding, enduring, incalculable. "Katerina," he says soft and crisp, quiet as incense. No one's allowed to call her that anymore. That's someone else. _She's_ some one else. "Katerina."

She would rather have been devoured by lions, drowned by leviathans than to once more catch his eye in the flow of a crowded room. Elijah raises his glass, a lofty spry twist upwards of the wrist, the turn of a cuff. Drinks.

Drinks deep and long and drains her dry.

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><strong>

**5**.

He killed her kindness, he killed that little girl. There's no softness about Katerina anymore, no sun bursting vitality - only an animal's anger burning brighter than any rage keeping her alive, only a cruel insightfulness, and awareness of her beauty. Uses her beautiful face the way a lion might use its claws. Living living living, on the run. Hating everyone, loving only herself.

He would hear talk of Katerina, now Katherine Pierce. Hear her through tales and informants like he was tailing a stranger now, someone he's never had opportunity to know, a terrible very foreign enigma. She did things he could never have imagined of her, became a creature he'd inadvertently made. He heard about her travels into Egypt, stealing into Henry Tudor's rooms, became the Madonna of all exploits, the Anne Boleyn of the ages. Out there conquering the world.

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><strong>

**4.**

I could have saved you, you only had to trust me. I had a _plan._

But Katerina is a spider to out weave all. And he won't be trapped again. _Never_ again.

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><strong>

**3.**

They don't know that she buried them all herself, that she walked once more onto the fields where her home once stood. She was unchanged, father had set up a new barn, the chicken pen was musty, the shingles rusting falling to the floor like flakes of soot. Katerina came back to her family, and she dug holes into the earth, they killed everyone, even the family dog for her betrayal - but she soldiered on, takes it on the chin. Just like she always has.

They've taken everything from her.

She lays them in the old churchyard, covered in white linen to hide the ribbons of their flesh from her eyes. She dug next to the lychyard, under the vines that twisted and dipped beneath the night sky. She lays her mother down with her arms folded, found the dog and tucked him next to her sister's grave.

The priest was old then, startled by how she looked, so young so unchanged. It had been years. He does the sign, warding away the devil and won't read the last sermon for her family.

Katerina does it herself, steals into the site in the heart of the night with soul eerily vacant, blackened as the walls of their burned down house. She thinks that if she lifted her arms that ashes might flake off her skin, burn away like bits of smouldering paper. She invokes god, herself. Is her own saint and priest and judge and jury. She thinks about her daughter, her little girl, the one she hadn't been able to keep. She doesn't even know what she looks like, only remembers how they packed her bags and sent her away from home because she was a ruined whore of a girl and a disgrace. She most certainly couldn't have her daughter, and she most certainly couldn't be kept under the god fearing roof of her family. Sullied scandal, a lost cause incapable of being saved, of retribution.

She invokes god, and vows it as the last time.

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><strong>

**2.**

He was a constant man, traditional in his standards. Klaus foresaw and predicted with a grim sort of satisfaction his falling under the doppelganger spell once more - Elijah had loved Tatia once, and even a man of his impeccable firmness would be once more be seduced by such a glittering memory made fresh. _Katerina._

Even the name rolled off the tongue like sin, like folly, like a _lie._

Katerina Petrova running about their garden, her skirts pale and coloured lilac. Laughing, shrieking his name, barefooted, unaware, nettles tangling into her hair and Elijah following her graciously, smiling softly, almost content. _Snared and satisfied in being trapped_, Klaus said with a sneer. _Mesmerised, caught._

Katerina came to Elijah, and he imagined her with her eyes bright as wine and her kisses like sighs and how he would never have her.

Elijah was too strong to keep anything as devastatingly beautiful as Katerina safe, too careful to reel in the wild thing she ended becoming later. When it was much much too late.

And Klaus his little brother, too insolent and proud to let him.

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><strong>

**1.**

"You have to chase me!" she sings. Slippers lost in the grass. Hair flying behind her, trailing like a flame. "And then you have to catch me!"

"But if I catch you," Elijah echoes, her liquid laughter is a water nymph's. Letting her slip through his fingers, "the game will be over."

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**_.  
><em>**

**_0._**

A kiss on her knuckles, a cock of a brow. There's a gentleman's honour about him, a hidden chivalry that endears him to her - reminds her of young farmhands, maybe the silly brown eyed man who was the father of her child, forever lost, now found. Against his brother's raw passion he almost seems brilliantly unremarkable.

He's too sensible to be dangerous, she thinks.

Too sensible.

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><p>—<p>

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__Now the windows are open, the moon is so bright.  
>And know that we need is one thing<br>Now what is there to allow?  
><em><em>Now what is there to allow?<em>_  
><em>_

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><p><strong>end notes:<strong> i find it completely impossible not to reference excerpts of random indie music when i write. but, um, tried my best, so. yeah. i'm going home now. review?


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